News Posts

The Urban Advantage Science Expo will return to the Museum for its eighth year on Saturday, June 9. More than 300 science projects will be presented by over 500 middle school students. Project topics reflect a wide range of subject areas in the life, Earth, and physical sciences that were investigated by students in connection to their class visits to the Urban Advantage partner institutions, and include projects on the effect of zebra mussels on the Hudson River ecosystem as well as whether music influences plant growth. Watch a video.

Fear can take many forms, from minor phobias to life-altering conditions such as PTSD. Now, new research is shedding light on how these so-called fear memories could be changed. At the final SciCafe of the season on Wednesday, June 6,neuroscientist Daniela Schiller will discuss her work on the neural mechanisms of emotional control and potential ways to modify or “erase” fear memories. Schiller recently answered a few questions about how memories are created and lost.

How did you first become interested in studying emotional memories?

It wasn’t an explicit decision. I started with philosophy and psychology, and I was interested in the brain and the mind. And the combination is the neural basis of behavior, and within behavior, emotion is fascinating because it’s the least willful process we have. We think emotions just happen to us, but they don’t just pop out of the blue. It’s interesting to look at the mechanism and see that it’s a very distinct process in the brain that you can observe and counteract and modulate.

The Museum’s free companion iPad app for the popular new exhibition Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence offers a close look at some of the extraordinary organisms that produce light. The app, which has been featured in the New and Noteworthy section of the iPad app store, reveals the beauty of bioluminescence through interactive animations, photo galleries, and videos. Each chapter of the app, which is adapted from the iPad content featured throughout the exhibition gallery, is set to a symphonic soundtrack composed exclusively for Creatures of Light.

A new study has used skull anatomy to show that the evolution of birds from dinosaurs may have resulted from a drastic change in dinosaur development.

In a study published this week in the journal Nature, researchers from Harvard University, the Museum, the New York Institute of Technology, The University of Texas at Austin, and the Autonomous University of Madrid report evidence that while many dinosaurs took years to reach sexual maturity, birds sped up the developmental clock, which led them to retain the physical characteristics of baby dinosaurs.

Four nights a year, the streets of Manhattan’s grid become the site for a spectacular sunset phenomenon known as Manhattanhenge. Below are answers to frequently asked questions about this event.

What is Manhattanhenge?

As Director of the Hayden Planetarium Neil deGrasse Tyson, who discovered the phenomenon and coined the term “Manhattanhenge,” explains in his Hayden Planetarium blog, Manhattanhenge takes place “when the setting Sun aligns precisely with the Manhattan street grid, creating a radiant glow of light across Manhattan’s brick and steel canyons, simultaneously illuminating both the north and south sides of every cross street of the borough’s grid. A rare and beautiful sight.”